(Radio Iowa) – We got our first taste of snow across the state and the first winter driving conditions today (Tuesday). The Iowa D-O-T’s Sinclair Stolle says the 511ia.org website can help you navigate this winter and that includes personalizing the info. “One of the ways to do that is the layer bar that’s on the far right side of the map. This also includes a legend tab that is dynamic based on the layers that you have turned on,” Stolle says. She says it makes it easy when you want to quickly check out the information on the 511IA.org site.

“If you just want to see certain things, and you want to see them all the time, you can turn on the layers and zoom to the area that you want, and then bookmark that U-R-L. And it’ll come back to that each time when you use that bookmark,” she explains. They added the winter mode button last year that lets you only view the information on winter driving. “It looks like a snowflake, it’s in the upper left corner of the website. And what that does is it only turns on the road conditions and plow locations,” Stolle says. “So that’s all you’re going to see if that’s all you want. It makes it quick and easy. Just click that button. And it’ll just take your view to those layers turned on.”

You can also get the 511IA.org app for your phone. “The winter road conditions are updated every two hours or as conditions change, whichever is sooner,” she says. Stolle says the site does not include information on county and local roads. “We are only putting road conditions out and other information and all the construction and incidents and things on the roads that we maintain, have jurisdiction on, and so that does not include city or county roadways,” Stolle says. She says they do have a regional winter road conditions layer that allows those on the border to see information from bordering states when a storm is coming in.